Remote medical monitoring systems provide the advantage of monitoring a plurality of medical devices connected to one or more patients from a single site. In a health care facility, a single monitoring system station permits simultaneous monitoring and interaction with remote medical devices located, for example, in a patient's hospital room. Network monitoring systems provide uniform and continuous patient monitoring while reducing the numbers of trained health care personnel needed to monitor and interact with each medical device.
Remote monitoring systems having numerous disadvantages are currently used in health care facilities. These prior art systems typically require manual entry of data into the patient's record. Waveform data or similar data is typically generated from the network system as a hard copy and manually entered by cut and paste into the patient's medical record. Manual entry of data into a patient's medical record is likely to introduce transcription errors in the patient's medical record.
Some prior art monitoring systems are capable of monitoring devices of the same make and model manufactured by the same company. Typically, health care institutions purchase medical devices, such as ventilators, from a number of different manufacturers. As currently known in the field of respiratory ventilators, in order to monitor a ventilator from a remote location, a remote monitoring system is required for each ventilator make and model. Consequently, a monitoring station and additional personnel are required to monitor each ventilator type. As a result, efficiency that would otherwise be introduced by having a network monitoring system that monitors heterogeneous ventilators, is diminished.